Computers are becoming increasingly more powerful while at the same time becoming less costly. This has resulted in the promulgation of computers into many homes and businesses throughout the world. Along with this increase in computing performance and popularity has also come an increase in the number of areas in which computers are used. Where once computers were used primarily for productivity-based applications (e.g., databases, word processing, spreadsheets, and so forth), a wide range of entertainment applications have become increasingly popular.
One such entertainment application is that of media content playback, such audio/video (e.g., movies) playback. For example, many newer computers are equipped with a DVD (digital versatile disc) drive that allows the computer to read a DVD and play the audio and/or video content on the DVD via speakers and/or display devices of the computer.
One difficulty faced in distributing content on DVD has been the concern over the ability of DVD content, especially movies, to be improperly copied and/or distributed without paying appropriate fees to the owner of the content. Thus, a security protection scheme referred to as CSS (Content Scrambling System) has been devised to encrypt the content on a DVD. Various keys have been established for various manufacturers of DVD content player applications, allowing DVD content to be played back by those applications. However, without the appropriate key(s), an application cannot decrypt (and thus cannot copy in a useable form) the encrypted content.
While the CSS system works with a single-computer system (that is, where the DVD player application and the DVD drive are part of the same computer), problems can arise in multiple-computer systems. For example, currently a computer running a Windows® operating system and a DVD player application cannot play back a movie from a remote DVD source (e.g., a remote computer or a remote media server). Thus, it would be beneficial to enhance current systems to be able to play back CSS protected content in multiple-computer systems.